Santiago

The 'New Socialism': Free Trade and F-16s

Manuel Cabieses, the Punto Final editor, giggles over what a burden the Pinochet case has become for Chile's political and military establishment. "Every morning, I can assure you that [Army] Commander in Chief Izurieta's first wish is that Pinochet has died overnight so he can bury him by lunchtime, put a big statute over his grave and forget him."

But it's not just the right and the army who want to be free of this albatross. So does the center-left governing coalition of Ricardo Lagos. "President Lagos told me just the other day he wished the old fucker would just go away and die," said an aide to a Chilean congressman.

The "renewed" Socialists led by Lagos and his Christian Democratic government partners--ambitiously embarked on a US "modernization" program--privately, and too often publicly, consider the whole human rights debate to be a nettlesome distraction. Said a disgusted Fabiola Letelier: "All this government really wants to do is to perfect Pinochet's free-market economic model. It's obsessed with globalization."

Meanwhile, the government and just about everybody else in Chile expects that in congressional elections later this year and in presidential elections five years out, the political right will probably win. It's a maddening paradox to many how it is that at the precise moment in which Pinochet's historical legacy is most awash in blood and infamy, just as his closet collaborators get marched into court, his onetime political supporters and heirs have become the ascendant electoral force.

And ascendant they are. A year ago, as Pinochet was being held in London, his onetime economic adviser Joaquin Lavín came within a hair of defeating Socialist Lagos--even though historically the Chilean right has trouble getting even 40 percent of the vote. Lavín then went on to win the mayoral election in Santiago handily. And in those same municipal elections, the right racked up nearly 50 percent of the vote nationwide. Lavín's Independent Democratic Union, a party founded in the 1980s by Pinochet's secret police, shocked the Chilean left when it triumphed in numerous working-class towns--including the once so-called People's Republic of San Miguel, a gritty Santiago suburb that used to boast a monument to Che Guevara. "The profound depoliticization of the Chilean people has allowed huge portions of the poor to no longer be able to distinguish between left and right," says Cabieses. "The governing party calls itself socialist, but I'd be ecstatic if we even had a social democratic political choice."

More than a decade after replacing Pinochet in power, the governing coalition has yet to reform the restrictive Constitution put in place by the dictatorship. Privatization begun under Pinochet continues, and the tattered health and education systems further decay. Government Socialists repeatedly rail against the free-market "neoliberal" model but then eagerly administer and manage it on a day-to-day basis. Less than 10 percent of the work force is unionized, and less than 3 percent is actually covered by collective-bargaining contracts. After ten years of promising to reform the dictatorship's draconian labor law, the government is finally taking action, but only after watering down organized labor's proposals. Chile still has no legal divorce. And even therapeutic abortion is outlawed.

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